Poverty Alleviation Through Geographic Targeting: How Much Does Disaggregation Help?

Using recently completed"poverty maps"for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, the authors simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined subgroups of the population according to their relative poverty status. They find large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as districts or villages. But these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. The results suggest that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms.

[1]  D. Coady,et al.  From Social Assistance to Social Development: Targeted Education Subsidies in Developing Countries , 2003 .

[2]  J. Baker,et al.  Poverty reduction through geographic targeting: How well does it work? , 1994 .

[3]  F. Ferreira,et al.  Inefficient Lobbying, Populism, and Oligarchy , 2004 .

[4]  K. Simler,et al.  On the Unequal Inequality of Poor Communities , 2004 .

[5]  Paul Glewwe.  Targeting assistance to the poor : Efficient allocation of transfers when household income is not observed , 1992 .

[6]  T. Fujii.  Commune-Level Estimation of Poverty Measures and its Application in Cambodia , 2004 .

[7]  J. Duclos,et al.  Poverty-Efficient Transfer Programs: The Role of Targeting and Allocation Rules , 2003 .

[8]  Jesko Hentschel,et al.  Combining Census and Survey Data to Trace the Spatial Dimensions of Poverty , 2012 .

[9]  E. Thorbecke,et al.  A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures , 1984 .

[10]  J. Lanjouw,et al.  Micro-Level Estimation of Welfare , 2002 .

[11]  Jonah B. Gelbach,et al.  Is More for the Poor Less for the Poor? The Politics of Means-Tested Targeting , 2002 .

[12]  P. Lanjouw,et al.  Constructing an indicator of consumption for the analysis of poverty : principles and illustrations with reference to Ecuador , 1996 .

[13]  Targeted policies for poverty alleviation under imperfect information: Algorithms and applications , 1989 .

[14]  J. Mistiaen,et al.  Putting Welfare on the Map in Madagascar Africa , 2002 .

[15]  R. Kanbur,et al.  Community and anti-poverty targeting , 2005 .

[16]  J. Lanjouw,et al.  Micro-Level Estimation of Poverty and Inequality , 2003 .

[17]  P. Lanjouw,et al.  Producing an Improved Geographic Profile of Poverty: Methodology and Evidence from Three Developing Countries , 2002 .